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Monday, February 22, 2016

Best War Movies of All Time - Based on 125 Online Rankings

Scene from Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) ranked number one War movie of all time.

Welcome to our Reel
Fives pre-launch movie rankings for the
best war movies of all time. Our Reel Fives team has found 125 published ranked
lists of the top war films online and ended up with 120 movies that made the
list. For each ranked list of greatest movies for the war genre we have taken
the top five ranked war films. The movie rankings on top war films that we
aggregated are included at the bottom of this post and include rankings of the
best movies in the war genre created by movie experts as well as rankings from
polling sites, such as ranker.com.

Author Tim O’Brien wrote “War
is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man;
war makes you dead” in his book The
Things They Carried (1998). This quote describes what a great war film ought
to be and our top films do that. War is nuanced because what one side views as
good, the other side views as evil and vice versa. Apocalypse Now (1979), the all-time best war movie, demonstrates
the complexity of war. Set during the Vietnam War, Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin
Sheen) is on a secret mission to assassinate Green Beret Colonel Kurtz (Marlon
Brando) who the military believes has gone insane. While Willard is on his
mission, he is forced to confront the reasons why Kurtz went insane. There is
no easy way out. In Saving Private Ryan (1998),
ranked second, Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) is determined to rescue Private Ryan
(Matt Damon) behind Nazi lines. The film personalizes war and illustrates the
tolls on the families of soldiers as Mrs. Ryan lost three sons and Captain
Miller did not want to have another son die. Stanly Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), ranked third, captures the realities of war
for the soldiers. The military brutalizes young men through training that
leaves them psychologically broken down to be able to kill, and the film
captures that.

While war movies are at times
heroic, they at times mix elements of humor and brutality.

Brutality and dehumanization
are products of war and so is humanity. Schindler’s
List (1993), ranked sixth, demonstrates that humanity can exist even in a
concentration camp. Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) has a change of heart and
decides to save some of the Jewish prisoners. Soldiers have autonomy and the
power to decide whether or not they want to fight. While soldiers are told they
must kill, they do not always want to. Paths
of Glory (1957), ranked fifth, illustrates that soldiers do not always want
to fight the enemy because they do not see why they should and their general
has to defend their actions. Platoon (1986),
ranked fourth, follows a young Vietnam soldier on his path to realizing that he
is not needed and that the war is unnecessary. These films add depth and nuance
to the war genre by simultaneously showing the worst and best of humanity.
Schindler saves some of the Jewish prisoners, and some soldiers decide not to
shoot. These small acts of humanity show that while war happens, people have a
choice to kill or not to kill.

We did not find any surprises
on the list as many of these movies have been recognized as great movies.
Vietnam and World War II era films are on the list more than other war films,
and we believe that could be in part due to the impact of both wars on society.
WWII is still a popular war era for film. Inglorious
Bastards (2009), ranked twenty-first, centers around Americans in the hunt
for Nazis. We see that the war genre also includes the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq, as one would expect. We have started to see this with The Hurt Locker (2008) and American Sniper (2014). However, the
list also shows that the genre loves its classic films. For instance, Casablanca (1942) is ranked eighteenth. The
war genre should continue to be nuanced and we do not expect that to change,
even with the glorification of violence in recent war films.